


one day

by popnographic



Category: Free!
Genre: Angst, Fate, Fluff, M/M, MakoRin Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-04 08:26:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5327360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/popnographic/pseuds/popnographic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Makoto's girlfriend dumps him and leaves him to fend for himself in a country he's never been in before, far <i>far</i> away from home. Luckily, fate brings him a knight in shining armour.</p><p> </p><p>  <b>Written for MakoRin Week 2015, day 2 (Dec. 15), "<i>Fate</i>".</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	one day

**Author's Note:**

> Art by [iska](http://iskabee.tumblr.com) paired with this fic can be found [here](http://iskabee.tumblr.com/post/135267119175/fate-the-lovely-fic-this-goes-with-by)!

“I don’t love you anymore,” she says, and Makoto wonders if she ever did. He wonders if he ever loved _her_ , and the only reason it hurts a little is because she steps into the car of another man, and the two take off, Makoto just standing by to watch the car disappear around the bend.

He wants to say he’ll be able to shrug it off, like he’s been able to tackle everything else that’s been hurled at him throughout his entire life, but he isn’t so sure. This might just be the last straw, or the straw that broke the camel’s back—the camel being Makoto. Not that it’s affected him physically, but with how it feels _mentally_ , it might as well have.

Makoto somehow makes it to a café nearby, where he in very broken English orders himself a glass of wine. He tells himself it’s fine to sit and drink by yourself in a situation like this, and besides—just sitting there and watching people is a good way to pass time as well. He still has one more day to spend in Florence, and how he’s going to do _anything_ without his now ex-girlfriend’s help is beyond him.

Really, he should’ve known things weren’t going to work out between them. The signs were right there in front of him all the time—no wonder Haru didn’t like her; he must’ve known—but Makoto was blind to them from the start. Of course he was. He’s always been oblivious to even the most blatantly obvious things that were visible to the blind eye, and it’s now come back to bite him in the ass. Again.

When he’s paid for his one glass of honestly pretty disgusting red wine, Makoto begins trudging his way down the streets despite not having a particular destination. How could he? He doesn’t know his way around this place, and even if he wanted to go back to his hotel room, what would he do there? Sit and feel sorry for himself? Getting lost in the narrow alleyways of Florence sounds a lot better in his more than half-drunken mind.

However, it doesn’t take him very long to realise he’s very much lost, and that no matter how hard he tries, he won’t be able to find his way back to the hotel on his own. Makoto tries his very hardest to communicate in what little English he knows, but he soon finds out that Italians aren’t very good at speaking English, either.

Many of them flat-out ignore him when he tries to approach them whilst speaking English, and they walk off pretending like they _hadn’t_ just been talked to. He’s just about to give up when he hears someone exclaiming something in Japanese, and Makoto feels like bursting out in tears of sheer relief right then and there.

“Hey!” a male voice says, and Makoto turns to the source of it. A man about his age walks up to him, waving, and Makoto tries to figure out if he’s met this guy somewhere before. Has he raced this guy in a swimming tournament, maybe? No, he can’t just go and assume everyone’s a _swimmer_ —he isn’t even one himself anymore, technically—but he can’t really come up with anything else that would make sense. So Makoto has no choice but to ask.

“I’m sorry, but do I know you?”

“No, you don’t, and I’m sorry for just running up to you like that. It’s just… well, you’re lost, right? Sorry, I couldn’t help but just notice how people completely blew you off. Do you need help? We have a guy on our team who speaks both Japanese and English.”

Makoto nearly _does_ cry in relief, but he bites back his tears and nods. “Yes. Yes please, that… would be great. I have no idea where I am right now.”

The guy grins at him. “To be honest, neither do I. Matsuoka, on the other hand, he’s just… he’s got a knack for learning how to find his way around places.”

_Matsuoka?_

“I’m sorry, did you say ‘Matsuoka’?” Makoto asks, blinking in confusion.

“Yeah! We’re here with our team, but we’re leaving tomorrow. You know a guy named Matsuoka?”

Makoto nods, a little too eagerly. “I do, I went to school with a Matsuoka Rin—“

“Oi, Takagi, we’re leaving you behind if you don’t hurry up!”

And then Makoto recognises the voice.

And then he sees him.

 

* * *

 

His eyes widen, and he’s pretty sure his draw drops right onto his toes. Rin looks pretty much the same way Makoto’s sure he looks right now, and the guy Makoto had just talked to laughs.

“Seems this is the guy you were talking about, huh.”

“Yeah,” Makoto says in a voice that doesn’t feel like his. He walks forward slowly and nearly stumbles, but Rin’s faster, and he catches Makoto before he has the chance of making an ass of himself.

“Makoto?” Rin says. “What… are _you_ doing here?”

He smiles up at Rin, feeling the wine course through his veins and how it’s making him dizzy. He’s always been a lightweight, and probably always will be. “I got dumped and abandoned, and now I’m all alone in a city I don’t know trying to get back to my hotel.”

Rin blinks at him, dumbfounded, but then he bursts out laughing. Makoto can’t help but smile at that; he likes hearing Rin laugh. “I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you getting dumped or anything, I just— oh god, we have so much to catch up on. Wait.” He turns to the guy apparently named Takagi, and Makoto sort of manages to get himself up on his feet again. “Head on back without me, I’ll manage on my own.”

“Unlike your friend?”

“Unlike Makoto, yeah. Tell the others so they won’t go searching for me or something.”

“Alright. Well, Makoto-kun, it was nice meeting you,” Takagi says, and Makoto smiles at him.

“You too, Takagi-kun.”

Takagi disappears, and Rin returns his attention to Makoto, grinning. “You know, it’s a shame I can’t drink tonight since we fly out early morning, otherwise I would’ve joined you in this… whatever it is you’d call it.”

“Pitying myself and wasting time until I leave?” Makoto suggests, and Rin laughs again, but he keeps it short.

“Sounds like you’ve had it rough, huh. What do you say we take a walk to catch up and for you to… er, sober up a little?”

Makoto snorts. “You know, I never thought I’d say this, but considering everything, I’d rather stay tipsy.”

“As long as you don’t pass out or embarrass yourself, because I can’t help you with that,” Rin replies, and Makoto agrees.

Even though he is a little bitter about his circumstances, Makoto can’t deny the beauty of Florence; the old buildings, the little alleyways where people hang laundry on clotheslines out their windows above their heads where they walk. There’s cobblestone just about wherever they go, but Makoto doesn’t mind. He finds it oddly nice, considering the fact that it’s almost impossible to find back in Iwatobi.

“Rin,” Makoto says, slightly out of breath, “slow down. You’re practically running, and I’m still not sober.”

Rin stops and looks back at Makoto as if he just realised how fast he’s been walking. Haruka told Makoto about this several years ago when Rin had taken him to Australia; how Rin was an _incredibly_ fast walker, and how he just didn’t seem to notice people falling behind. This case is certainly very similar to what Haruka described.

“Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t realise,” Rin replies. Instead of walking slower, Rin’s solution is to grab Makoto’s hand, and have them continue walking at his pace, which Makoto surprisingly enough is fast to adapt to, despite his occasionally wobbly steps.

Makoto’s so overwhelmed by the entire thing that he finds himself actually starting to tear up as he looks down at their joined hands, and soon enough, he begins sniffling, and Rin stops walking again.

“Makoto? Hey, are you okay?”

Now Makoto’s full-out crying, and he tries to wipe away his tears, but they keep on stubbornly falling down his cheek. Rin brings up his free hand to stroke his cheek, and his expression is sombre—almost sad—and Makoto’s heart aches.

“Do you remember the name of your hotel?”

Makoto flinches. “Are you… are you already dropping me off?”

Rin shakes his head. “I’m going with you. Hotel rooms are probably more suited for talking than out on the streets, don’t you think?”

Makoto manages a nod in response before he sniffles, and Rin once again wipes away his tears with a thumb, and the smile on his face makes Makoto want to melt under his touch.

 

* * *

 

Makoto and Rin make it back to his hotel, and Makoto collects himself a little in the lift up to his room. He doesn’t even have to guess if his ex has already taken her stuff and left, because he’s greeted with a mostly empty hotel room save for his suitcase on the floor and a few other items scattered here and there. He sighs, and lets Rin in before he closes the door behind them.

“Go sit down,” Rin commands him. “I’ll go get us something to drink, and I’ll go down to the reception and pay them for it before I leave.”

“But—“

“No. Go, Makoto.”

So that’s what he does. He sits down on the couch, and pulls his knees up under his chin, hugging them with both arms. Why did everything hit him like a bag of bricks _now_? Why not when Rin left Japan to move to Australia? Why not the first time he and Rin talked over Skype since he moved? Why not any other time, why now? He hopes it’s mostly the alcohol’s fault for making him this vulnerable, but that doesn’t really make him accept it any more than if it hadn’t been the culprit.

Rin returns after a little while with two bottles of Cola, and nudges Makoto’s arm with one of them.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah,” Makoto responds. “Sorry.”

Rin makes a disapproving sound. “For what?”

“For… this. It’s just—“

“—you’ve had it rough, I know. I mean, I don’t know what or why or how, but I know. And it’s okay to react to it. Let yourself live like a normal person, Makoto. You’ve… always done that. Put others above yourself.”

Makoto can’t help but laugh at that. “Maybe that comes from being an older sibling.”

“That’s a bad excuse, Makoto, and you know it is.”

“Yeah.”

They sit in silence for a bit, and it feels weird, because Makoto feels like he should probably fill said silence with a lot of questions, conversations on what’s been going on in their lives in the past few years they haven’t seen each other in person. Sure, Skype helps a lot, but it will never live up to seeing someone in person. Especially Rin.

“You know,” Rin finally says after a while, “I’ll always regret not having asked you out back then. I really should have.”

Makoto sighs. “I wanted to do it, too, but… things just didn’t seem right.”

“I know. And that’s part of why it sucks. How everything just seemed to _not_ want us to be together. I don’t think you and I ever had even ten minutes alone to just _talk_ in high school.”

He thinks back to that one time Rin had come over to his and Haruka’s hotel room to talk to Haruka about his insecurities regarding his future, but instead had begun a similar talk with Makoto since the other wasn’t around. _Begun_ , because that’s all it was. It was the beginning of a conversation that could’ve been so much more had they not been interrupted. Makoto has to agree that fate always seemed to want to keep the two apart, and it makes him both bitter and sad about it even to this day.

“You’re probably right. It’s funny… we grew up together, and we were still so distant. Even so, I— I couldn’t help but just fall for you. Head over heels.”

Makoto’s aware of the fact that he’s still a little tipsy, and that’s why his mouth is on involuntary autopilot. Unfortunately, he isn’t able to stop himself, but he also figures that, if he doesn’t say this now, he might never have the chance to do so. Fate has always seemed to harbour some kind of hatred for his friendship with Rin, and for what could’ve been between them.

What could’ve been, several years ago, what could’ve still been ongoing. He wonders what things would look like, if he and Rin were to be dating now. Would Rin still be chasing his dream of making it internationally as a professional swimmer, going to the Olympics and becoming one of the world’s best swimmers?

On the other hand, would he have sacrificed all of that just so he could be with Makoto? It’s certainly possible, so Makoto wonders if maybe this was for the best, after all; if fate wasn’t actually trying to screw them over, but to keep them from getting heartbroken. Fate works in mysterious ways, and maybe it’s something that Makoto will never be able to understand.

“I realised it when I saw you,” he continues, “here. In Italy of all places. That maybe… maybe it means something. I’m not mad for thinking that, am I?”

Rin scoots closer, and then puts their foreheads together with a sigh. It sounds like he’s almost relieved, and it makes Makoto’s heart skip a beat. “No. I feel the same, Makoto. I’ve never stopped loving you, and I don’t think I ever will. Call me cheesy if you want, I don’t care—but I think fate brought us back together for a reason.”

 

* * *

 

Makoto and Rin go to the airport together in the morning from his hotel; Rin’s flight leaving an hour before his. Rin had ended up spending the night, a night Makoto won’t soon forget. A night during which he felt closer to Rin than he ever has, and he wonders if they’ll ever be that close again, if fate will bring them back together if even just one more time.

He sees Rin off with a kiss, and when he turns around, he doesn’t look back. Looking back will only make it more difficult, he reasons, so Makoto walks towards his own gate instead, and takes a deep breath to stop his tears from falling.

When he’s boarded his flight, and the plane has taken off, Makoto looks out the window at the sky above. He clenches his fist in determination, smiling a little to himself. No, Makoto doesn’t wonder if fate will bring Rin back to him again. He _knows_ it will. If not tomorrow, if not next week, next month, then someday.

**Author's Note:**

> [radiodread](http://radiodread.tumblr.com) @ tumblr


End file.
